Free Ghosts of Tom Joad by Peter Van Buren

beautiful. Every one of us imagined flying off the walkway and sailing over Reeve and that wasn’t a little kid thing to think. Up there that night, measuring the awesomeness, everything was still ahead of us, anything seemed possible to us.
    â€œHey Earl, you believe in Heaven?”
    â€œWhat Muley, you drunk already man?”
    â€œNo, it’s just up here, I don’t know, I start to think about those kind of things.”
    â€œI guess so. My old man’s always talking about going to Hell, so I guess that means there’s Heaven, too.”
    â€œWhy don’t you two go hug under a rainbow and write a fucking poem or something?”
    â€œSeriously guys, I been to Heaven. Her name was Patty Kennedy.”
    â€œAnd if she blew you that must’ve been a living Hell for her.”
    â€œWhat if every time you said something that stupid God made your wiener one inch shorter?”
    â€œShut up, this is serious.”
    â€œMuley’s would be like only that long.”
    â€œNo you guys, seriously, do you think we’re going to Heaven?”
    â€œShit, Muley, now you got me thinking about it.”
    â€œSo whatta you think?”
    â€œI think so. Whatever we done wrong, it ain’t been nothing so bad, just screwing around stuff. We ain’t never killed anybody or nothing.”
    â€œI heard Earl’s dad tell someone to go to Hell. Wouldn’t it be cool if you do that, like it was a God kinda secret that if you said it, then it happened to the person you said it to.”
    â€œThe way Earl’s old man cusses, Hell’d be full already.”
    â€œI had this dream once where I was a girl.”
    â€œMe too, but I had to go to school naked.”
    â€œYou guys are stupid, remembering things that never happened.”
    â€œSo what about this then. What if we inherited sins, like from our dads?”
    â€œIsn’t that what Jesus fixed?”
    â€œWhat’s your problem? Did your mom smoke during pregnancy or somethin’?”
    â€œMan, we’d better check because that’s important.”
    â€œSo we’d go to Heaven then right, ’cept maybe Earl’s dad?”
    â€œShut up you guys, and be serious. Lookit out there, how pretty. That’d be what Heaven looks like.”
    â€œDo they have night in Heaven? I thought it was always daytime, because it was above the clouds and all.”
    â€œYou guys are idiots. We better climb down before we get caught up here and for sure we’d end up in Hell.”
    We moved on to Muley’s back shed, where his old man kept a steel bass boat. The shed was a pretty special place for us, smelling like old, wet sweaters and full of cobwebs and stuff like car parts and ratty sports gear that was as attractive then as free beer is now. There was an old Coke sign with a girl in a thick 1950s bikini that provided most of us our first unrequited but warming mental image. We all remembered how cool it stayed in there on hot days, and how we could warm it up with the electric heater in the winter and make it smell like burnt toast. The bass boat held a place of pride among the junk, but had seen better days. We tried to fix it with Bondo, the putty stuff you use on car dents, but that didn’t stick too well to all the rust, and the thing floated more out of stubbornness than anything else. Flat bottom, seats two safely. Rides low in the water, and you got to paddle. We’d take it out on the river from time to time, drinking beer when we could, horsing around when we couldn’t.
    This night we did have some beer and the four of us decided it made a lot of sense to take the boat out on the river after dark, kind of a thrill. It was a warm, heavy, humid night, still then soft around us. The moon was hanging. I don’t know what you call it, but it looked like God’s toenail up there. A riot of stars you could only see after your eyes got used to it. Lightning bugs. Car